'Occupy' protesters take to streets

The scheduled cleanup of the park where hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters have camped for four weeks was postponed Friday and at least 14 protesters have been arrested in New York City, and dozens of others around the country, according to reports.

A group of protesters started marching soon after the postponement announcement, according to a livestream of the protest. Crowds shouted “Whose streets? Our streets” and “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street” as they made their way through the city. A group marched to Wall Street, while others moved toward City Hall, according to reports.

The New York Post reported that eight people were apprehended at Maiden and Walter Streets after turning over a police scooter on Broadway and at least five people were arrested during another confrontation with police. The police officer was on a scooter and drove over a protester’s leg, the paper wrote.

Many protesters marched back to Zuccotti Park around 8:30 a.m. as the clashes died down, the Post wrote.

Mayor Bloomberg made his weekly radio show appearance Friday morning, saying Brookfield Properties informed him the company “got lots of calls from many elected officials threatening them and saying, ‘If you don’t stop this [the planned cleanup], we’ll make your life more difficult’.”

The mayor said he was not told who called Brookfield. Bloomberg’s girlfriend, Diana Taylor, serves on Brookfield’s board of directors.

Bloomberg told the radio show Brookfield Properties made the decision to call of the cleanup around midnight on Thursday night and is hoping to broker some kind of agreement with protesters in the next few days.

“Brookfield said they want to take a couple of days to try and negotiate something,” he said. “If you get through a couple of days, the question is what would be possible, and is it more complex to do two days from now what they wanted to do today?”

Bloomberg said he is not sure what kind of agreement the company hopes to work out, but said “if they cannot, then they would want to go ahead and do exactly what they wanted to do this morning.”

Since Zuccotti Park is private, Bloomberg noted the city has no right to go in and shut down the site. He did, however, say that the city “will provide police protection” for whatever Brookfield Properties decides to do.

“The city does not have the legal right to go in and close the park unless the public safety is clearly threatened,” he said.

But, he added, “there has to be some resolution eventually.”

Occupy Wall Street protesters had gathered to clean the park on Friday morning and vowed to resist the scheduled cleaning operation they said was just a ploy to evict them, according to reports. The mayor’s office, however, announced the park’s owners had canceled Friday’s cleanup.